


(he wasn't there again today)

by LizBee



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Gen, post-"Cold Blood"
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-05-31
Updated: 2010-05-31
Packaged: 2017-10-11 16:33:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 443
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/114409
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LizBee/pseuds/LizBee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>To be remembered is to be immortal.  The Doctor knows what it's like to be forgotten.</p>
            </blockquote>





	(he wasn't there again today)

_Yesterday, upon the stair,  
I met a man who wasn't there  
He wasn't there again today  
I wish, I wish he'd go away... _

Hughes Mearns

 

It takes Amy over an hour to find the Doctor. It turns out that he's in the wardrobe room, sitting on an old-fashioned steamer trunk, staring blankly at a mud-stained kilt bundled into a rough ball on the floor.

"If it's cross-dressing you want," she says, sitting beside him, "that's fine, but I draw the line at mud-wrestling."

He almost smiles at that, and she's glad, because she may not know his name – and thank you, Dream Lord, for planting that nasty seed of a doubt along with nightmares of a second-rate university degree and an office job and Friday nights spent in nasty meat-market bars with spray-tanned friends – but she knows when he's hiding something darker behind his innocent-what-who-me-I'm-just-a-nice-lunatic-who-saves-planets routine.

"Whose was it?" she asks more gently.

"My best friend." She raises her eyebrows, and he smiles and nudges her shoulder with his. "One of my best friends."

"Where is he now?"

"He went home. To live out his life. What there was of it."

"We could go and visit."

She knows at once it's the wrong thing to say.

"No," he says. "No." He pulls his knees up to his chest and leans against her, the way she always thought a best friend would, if she'd ever had a proper best friend. "Do you know," he said, "it's a terrible thing to be forgotten. Memory is … a kind of immortality."

"Don't you practically live forever?"

"I'd trade a few years to be remembered."

"Is that the real reason you go to museums?"

She never knows what to say in these serious moments. She thought they were joking when they told her that her parents were dead, and maybe, inside, she's still laughing. There's a space inside her where a grown-up should be. She doesn't know how to be a proper person, she's never had anyone to show her how. No one she could trust.

The Doctor takes her hand.

"Don't ever forget me," he says.

"Four psychiatrists," she tells him, "and I still believed in you. Even when I hated you for not being real, I believed in you. I'm not going to forget. Ever."

It's the closest she's ever come to saying, I love you to anyone.

His smile almost reaches his eyes, and he kisses her on the forehead.

"Come on, Amelia Pond." he says, standing up and holding his hand out, pulling her to her feet. "It's a big universe out there. Let's see if we can't make a few happy endings.

 

end


End file.
